kallistixf: A golden apple with Kallisti written on it in Greek (Default)

What rituals would make you happier?
What would you like to introduce to your life?
Introduce no more than one or two rituals at a time
and make sure they become habitual before you introduce new ones.
"Incremental change is better than ambitious failure.
Success feeds on itself."

-- Tal Ben-Shahar, Happier, p. 9-10

It's been a mighty relaxing ten days. My break wasn't quite complete: I used Twitter, Facebook, and email a few times each to arrange logistics, and spent a couple of hours reading blogs one night to see what was going on in the world. Even so, it was a dramatically different rhythm. Which makes it a great opportunity to rethink how I'm engaging with social media.

As a first step, last night and this morning, I checked the places I usually hang out. Have I mentioned recently how much I like social networks? Usually I don't hit all of them in order, so it was interesting to compare-and-contrast. Each of them has a different feel -- and a different focus:
  • my Dreamwidth reading page has comics, information about Nanowrimo, and a couple of great diversity-oriented blog posts.
  • free-association, tribe.net, Diaspora *, and Google+ all have privacy and civil liberties stories I haven't read; Travel Underground and FlyerTalk cover the TSA
  • Twitter, Google+ and a few of my favorite blogs have bunches of stuff on activism and politics
  • Geek Feminism and (rather unexpectedly) Quora* cover women in technology
  • Facebook has updates and photos from several of my closest friends and a lot of activist and professional former colleagues
  • Google+ and Hacker News have tech and entrepeneurial news -- and as a bonus, Google+ also has some links on writing and some great photography
  • in email, there's a conference being organized -- and my brother's sent me a funny link

It sure seems like a ridiculously long list ... in fact my first reaction was "no wonder I'm so much more relaxed when I'm taking a break from online." Then again I don't want to give any of them up -- especially since almost all of them are places where I hang out with a diverse group of people -- including some good friends -- who I don't stay in touch with any other way.** So yeah, it seems like a good time to look at my rituals.

Since I want to spend more time on Dreamwidth and Diaspora *, I'll make those the focus of my start-the-day ritual: checking them first, sharing some links on D* and writing a DW blog post, and jumping into the comments in both places.

Here's to incremental change!

jon


PS: It's easy enough to tweet the links and share them on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ as well -- and for privacy and civil liberties stories it's not so hard to cross-post them to tribe and free-association too. But at what point does it become too much and lead me to distraction? Hmm, dunno; I'll have to experiment.

* where Harvard student Alisha Ramos posted a link to her' senior thesis project Where are the ladies
** Hacker News and Quora are the exceptions here, but they're important for professional purposes.




If you don't have an account you can create one now.
HTML doesn't work in the subject.
More info about formatting

January 2020

S M T W T F S
    1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
262728293031 

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 11th, 2025 11:34 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios